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A coalition of labor unions, political action, and community groups march against DOGE and proposed cuts to Medicaid, housing, food assistance, and other vital programs in New York, New York, on March 15, 2025. Some expressed their outrage with Senator Chuck Schumer for voting to advance the Republican funding bill.
Democrats vs. Democrats
Senate Democrats unleashed a storm last week when Schumer and nine other Democrats voted in favor of a Republican-authored funding bill. To vote no, Schumer argued, would be to risk a shutdown of the federal government, a move President Donald Trump and advisor Elon Musk might use to further slash the federal bureaucracy.
House Democrats and others were furious with Schumer’s decision. They have argued that the Republican need for Democratic votes to pass the bill gave Democrats rare legislative leverage over Republicans and a chance to strike a blow at Trump. By refusing to stand up to the president and his party when given the chance, they’re leaving the public without a positive reason to vote for Democrats.
More immediately, Congress will replay this drama in September when the next funding bill comes to the floor. Now that Schumer has set a precedent by caving to pressure, critics within his party ask, what’s to prevent Republicans from offering a bill that Democrats find even more toxic than the one that passed last week, with confidence that that bill will pass too?
A new poll finds that Democratic-aligned adults say, by a margin of 52% to 48%, that the leadership of the Democratic Party is currently taking the party in the wrong direction. There isn’t yet a groundswell within the party that favors replacing Schumer as Senate minority leader, but that moment may be coming.US Capitol at nighttime
Will there be a government shutdown?
Amid the chaos of tariffs, trade wars, stock market slumps, and global conflicts, is the US government headed for a shutdown on Friday? The Senate is struggling to reach an agreement on the continuing resolution passed by the House, which would keep federal funding basically the same as it is now until Sept. 30.
The resolution needs 60 votes to be brought to the floor for a final vote, where it can be passed by a simple majority. This means Republicans need to convince at least eight Democrats to get on board. If the Dems play ball, the government stays open, but Donald Trump and his Department of Government Efficiency get a win – one that will allow them to keep pursuing their agenda and gutting so much of the government Congress is looking to fund.
Democrats would prefer a shorter continuing resolution for one month instead of the six months in the Republican plan since the stopgap funding measure doesn’t come with the robust Congressional oversight on spending that a regular budget bill would. The showdown also represents a broader struggle, not just between Republicans and Democrats, but also between Congress and a White House that is asserting – and extending – its power, testing the limits of lawmakers and the law.
But the Dems don’t appear to be united on shutting down the government and are likely to give the GOP enough votes to advance their bill to the next stage -- where it can become law with just Republican votes. They will then vote no, going on record in opposition but with the full understanding that the GOP will pass it and the government will stay open. They also may try to save face first by voting on their own, shorter-period, temporary funding bill, though it will never pass.
Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., talks with reporters in Russell building after a senate vote on Wednesday, February 19, 2025.
Dems vs GOP: Who Blinks?
House Speaker Mike Johnson is expected to pass a budget bill with only Republican support on Wednesday, sending Senate Democrats an imminent predicament: Either approve a spending bill created solely by the GOP or trigger a shutdown standoff – a strategy they have consistently criticized in the past.
Republicans need at least eight Democratic votes, assuming no additional GOP lawmakers join Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who has committed to voting against the bill.
Democrats in the House have vowed to oppose the bill unless it includes language mandating that the Trump administration can’t cut the funds they allocate, and favor their alternative bill extending funding at current levels for four weeks instead – giving lawmakers time to craft a bipartisan funding package. However, a few Dems in the Senate may be willing to side with Republicans. Democratic Sen. John Fetterman,for example, has already committed to backing the bill.
The bill would extend government funding at current levels for seven months while adding $6 billion for defense funding and cutting $13 billion from nondefense spending. While that means some nondefense programs will be cut, it’s not expected to touch Medicaid or Social Security, or to be used as a means for Congress to hop on the DOGE train and start drastically downsizing the government. Those larger budget battles aren’t likely until the fall, when Congress needs to set a budget for next year.
A flag is left at the event held by Democratic presidential nominee U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris during Election Night, at Howard University, in Washington, U.S., November 6, 2024.
Where do Democrats go from here?
One month out from the election, the dust is settling around Democrats’ new reality. The final outstanding congressional race was called on Wednesday, solidifying Republican control of the House and Senate. Meanwhile, Donald Trump is entering the White House after winning the Electoral College and the popular vote, and the conservatives hold a majority on the Supreme Court.
But enough about the Republicans. We get it, they’ve got a lot of power. So, where do Democrats go from here?
Analysts are still picking apart exactly what doomed Kamala Harris in the last election, but it’s clear that the Democrats bled base voters. Trump made gains among Black voters, Latino voters, and voters who make under $50,000 a year. These groups are at the heart of who the Democratic Party sees itself as serving and standing for, leaving the party “listless and leaderless,” according to Eurasia Group US analyst Noah Daponte-Smith. “The shift toward Trump among ancestrally Democratic voters has really jolted the party,” he adds, but what will they take away from this reckoning defeat?
In the short term, the Democrats will undergo a leadership transition, and new faces are likely to skew younger. Part of this is generational, as the party’s “old guard” of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer fade from the scene. Lining up to take their places are representatives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is poised to win control of the powerful House Oversight Committee and is far more politically adroit than her fellow progressive “Squad” members. Meanwhile, governors whose names were floated to replace Joe Biden’s on the ticket — including Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, and Josh Shapiro — will spend the next four years positioning themselves for a fierce primary fight in 2028.
In the long term, Democrats will be looking to win back the House in 2026, which Daponte-Smith predicts “should be eminently possible” thanks to Republicans having only a narrow majority and because the opposition party almost always makes gains after losing a presidential election.
“That will allow them to block the Trump legislative agenda in 2027-28,” he says, “and will give them the gavels to conduct investigations, as they did in the first Trump term.” A win in the House would give them renewed hope going into 2028. That being said, if they don’t win, true panic will set in.
But sometime between then and now, Democrats need to find clarity on their platform. The problem? There is no consensus on what led to their downfall in this election. While Harris’ defeat has some Democrats ready to start from scratch, many blame her loss on the party moving too far left and alienating dependable Democrats in the center. Others believe that the party’s message was fundamentally sound, but Biden’s late withdrawal and unpopularity doomed Harris from the get-go. Meanwhile, supporters of Bernie Sanders echo that the party lost because they left the working class behind.
Daponte-Smith says his big question about the Democrats’ next platform is which parts of the Trump 2.0 agenda they concede, like how Biden maintained Trump’s China tariffs. Potential contenders, in his view, could be RFK’s Make America Healthy Again agenda or a more restrictive stance on immigration.
We will get some clarity on the Democrats’ new direction on Feb. 1, when the party elects a new chair. Back in 2016, this election turned into a proxy fight between progressives and mainstream Democrats. This time around, it has the potential to be the same. So far, the field remains wide open, with four candidates who have officially put their hats in the ring and a dozen or so others whose names are being circulated. We will be watching this race as it will undoubtedly be an inflection point for how the party plans to move past their disastrous 2024 performance.
Opinion: Mike Tyson, born killers, and the Democrats’ media problem
There are times in life when it is important to listen to Mike Tyson. For the Democrats, right now is one of those times.
As some of you may know, the fearsome former heavyweight champ is about to fight Jake Paul, a 27-year-old boxing-curious YouTube star 30 years his junior. It will be Iron Mike’s first real fight in almost 20 years.
For anyone who remembers watching Tyson in the ring – or even challenging him on “Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!” as a child – it seems obvious that Iron Mike, even at 57, is going to kill Glass Jake, isn’t it?
But I’m not a boxing analyst, I’m a political analyst, and so what sticks with me is the way Tyson, in a recently released Netflix documentary entitled “Countdown Paul vs. Tyson,” explains the difference between himself and Paul.
“He’s a manufactured killer,” Tyson says, watching as Paul claims to be the new face of boxing. “Television and papers made him a killer. I’m a natural-born killer.”
Manufactured killers versus natural-born killers. This distinction is on my mind these days as I’m reading the post-mortems on Kamala Harris’ election loss to Donald Trump. In particular, the ones that focus on how Trump’s deft engagement with non-traditional media – in particular, podcasts popular with young men – helped him win.
The Democrats, some are saying, need to “build their own Joe Rogan.” The reference, of course, is to “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the most listened-to podcast in America. Rogan, a former UFC fight commentator and one-time Bernie-bro, has become a celebrated voice in MAGAland, and a hugely influential figure among the millions of young men (of all races) who flocked to Trump at the polls.
Trump spent three hours with Rogan and his 11 million regular listeners, while Harris refused, reportedly because she was worried about backlash from some of her progressive staffers. This has become a microcosm of the ways Democrats failed to get out of the mainstream media bubble to engage with voters who were either undecided or disillusioned.
The problem for the Democrats isn’t that they don’t have a media ecosystem of their own. They do – it’s just that it’s mostly the mass media, precisely the kinds of outlets that are suffering a slow-motion knockout as Americans’ trust in legacy media plummets.
The data on that score are stark: Only about a third of Americans trust mass media now. The partisan splits on it are glaring. Some 54% of Democrats still trust the mainstream, but only half as many independents agree. Among Republicans, the mark is just 12%.
Podcasters and streamers have leaped into this vacuum of trust. Over the past 15 years, the share of Americans who regularly listen to pods has quintupled to nearly 50%. That doesn’t even capture the millions of hours people spend getting news and views from streamers on YouTube, Rumble, and other video platforms.
Conservative activists and campaigns have exploited this space particularly well, with 1%-funders like the Kochs, the Wilkses, or Peter Thiel pouring huge amounts of money into finding and elevating young influencers who have audiences – and credibility – of their own.
Countering that from the left, if the Democrats want to, won’t be easy. As some have pointed out, many young, left-wing influencers are at a disadvantage. The right-wing influencer set is funded by a whole constellation of conservative billionaires, but left-of-center activists with a more overtly “soak the rich” message might find it harder to get similar funding from Democrat-aligned one-percenters.
Democrats certainly need a better media strategy. But the biggest mistake they could make would be to believe it’s possible to “build” a Joe Rogan or even a series of Joe Rogans. You can’t build that any more than you can grow a Mike Tyson in a laboratory.
To get out of the wilderness, the Democrats need to get out of their bubble. They need to go find – and support – some natural-born killers of their own. Trying to simply manufacture them, in a deeply anti-establishment era, would only lead to more knockouts at the ballot box.
Trump's America: How MAGA came out on top
On this episode of GZERO World, Ian Bremmer unpacks the implications of Donald Trump’s decisive election win, marking his historic return to office and the GOP's comprehensive control over government (assuming they hold onto the House). Despite polls suggesting a razor-close election, Trump won with strong support across critical swing states, including Pennsylvania, where voter shifts were significant even in traditionally Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia. Bremmer discusses Nov 5 and its wide range of implications with Vanderbilt historian Nicole Hemmer and Wall Street Journal correspondent Molly Ball. How did Trump’s return signal a change election? How much of it was driven by voters' discontent with inflation and immigration, and how much was simply the appeal of a populist alternative to the status quo.
The conversation highlights Trump’s longstanding opposition to globalism and his strategy to reshape America’s place on the world stage. With the GOP controlling the presidency, Senate, and likely the House, Trump's second term could bring sweeping policy changes, including a push to consolidate executive power and reduce judicial and institutional independence. Reflecting on the stakes, Molly Ball comments, “If there are not those barriers before him, what is he willing to do? What norms and traditions, not to say laws, is he willing to violate in order to pursue his goals?” Hemmer adds, “The erosion of representative democracy…has accelerated over the past 10 years,” emphasizing the risks of unchecked power. They also examine the Democratic Party’s struggle to resonate with working-class voters across racial lines and its internal debate over progressive versus centrist policies. With both parties facing pressure, there remains an enduring tension between America's democratic ideals and the growing appetite for anti-establishment reform.
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).
Why voters went back to Trump, with Molly Ball and Nicole Hemmer
Listen: On the GZERO World podcast, Ian Bremmer dives into the far-reaching consequences of Donald Trump’s return to office as he becomes the first president since Grover Cleveland to serve non-consecutive terms. With strong wins across key swing states like Pennsylvania, Trump’s decisive victory reflects widespread voter frustration over issues like inflation and immigration and signals a major shift toward populism and anti-establishment sentiment. Historian Nicole Hemmer notes, “We’re witnessing the acceleration of democratic erosion, where checks and balances may no longer hold,” pointing to the dangers of unchecked power as Trump’s administration begins to take shape.
Joined by Vanderbilt historian Hemmer and Wall Street Journal reporter Molly Ball, Bremmer explores how Trump’s policies and approach could reshape American governance, especially with the GOP in control of the Executive, Senate, and likely the House. Ball highlights the risks involved, saying, “The real test will be whether the barriers that once existed to curb executive power still stand—or if they’re eroded by design.” They also reflect on the Democratic Party’s internal challenges, including how it must find ways to reconnect with working-class voters and navigate its ideological divide between progressive and centrist visions.
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Donald Trump will take office with unprecedented power
Donald Trump’s 2024 election win gives him a powerful mandate from voters frustrated with government gridlock and bloated bureaucracy. That, along with the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential power, means Trump will take office in January with unprecedented impunity to enact his agenda, radically remake the Federal government, and rewrite institutional norms. So what happens next? On GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, Molly Ball, senior political reporter at The Wall Street Journal, and Nicole Hemmer, a political historian specializing in conservative media, discuss the implications of a second Trump presidency and how he plans to fulfill promises to voters frustrated with the status quo. Trump will be reined in by the Constitution, but beyond that, will face little accountability, giving him near-total power to enact sweeping changes to democratic institutions.
“I think a lot of people are frustrated with the feeling that our institutions are so calcified and bottle-necked that they don’t allow anything to get done,” Balls says, “So I think there is a mandate for Trump to actually execute on his agenda.”
“I think the idea that the president has free rein does have more popular support than I think many liberals and proponents of rule of law would hope,” Hemmer adds, “The idea that there are levers that can be pulled that will suddenly snap into place an accountability regime, those levers don't exist.”
GZERO World with Ian Bremmer, the award-winning weekly global affairs series, airs nationwide on US public television stations (check local listings).
New digital episodes of GZERO World are released every Monday on YouTube. Don't miss an episode: subscribe to GZERO's YouTube channel and turn on notifications (🔔).